Rapper and author Darren McGarvey introduces his new TV series Class Wars with a bold promise: “In
this film I am going to prove to you just how entrenched social class remains in Scotland.”
The series articulates how class is a cage for the poor and liberator of the rich – and how social status is determined by more than wealth.
Record columnist Darren said: “The gulf that separates is not just financial. It’s everything from etiquette to accent, the sports we play to the clothes we wear.”
In the four-part series, he dons tweeds at Edinburgh’s Lauriston Castle, goes grouse shooting and gets acquainted with cricket and polo.
He also travels to Scotland’s oldest council estate in Dundee, talks to gambling addicts and speaks to a rural estate owner and workers in a call centre.
It is three years since Darren’s personal social commentary of hardship, Poverty Safari, exploded on to the literary scene, winning him the prestigious Orwell Prize.
It saw him feted by the media, appearing on the cover of GQ, on the panel of Question Time and on Radio 4 to commentate on poverty from first-hand experience.
Ironically, a career railing against the injustice of poverty freed him financially but left him in a personal no man’s land, identifying culturally as working class while, on paper, now being middle class.
Darren grew up in a violent home on a sink estate in Glasgow’s Pollok but now when he goes back there, it is usually with a TV crew.
He said: “When I go back to Pollok, I have to confront how much I have changed and how much of that change is for the better or some kind of betrayal. You don’t get where I am now without compromise.
“A lot of the tension and conflict I feel is because of this voice in my head I imagine to be people from Pollok judging me and scrutinising me.”
The series explores how the winners and losers of the UK’s socio-economic competition are superficially perceived.
Darren looks uncomfortable when he walks into a baronial drawing room in tweeds and a cap to meet butler Simeon Rosset for lessons on “gentlemanly conduct”.
There is palpable resentment when Simeon tells him to stand straight, take his hands out of his pockets, pull up his socks and that a gentleman never wears a hat indoors.
Simeon admits the tweed version of Darren is someone he would consider “worth my time speaking to”, compared to his Loki rapper persona in “joggies”.
Simeon, who came from a “rough neighbourhood” to become CEO of a butler school, isn’t resentful of his wealthy clients. He said: “I see the wealth class system as an aspirational thing you can move through. It is open to anyone to work their way up.”
In the UK, 64 per cent of Cabinet members are privately educated, as are 75 per cent of senior judges and 43 per cent of newspaper columnists.
Studies have shown Britain has the worst record on social mobility anywhere in the Western world. The idea that if the poor were simply to be more industrious and ambitious they too could be wealthy, doesn’t wash with Darren.
He said: “My success is not just down to me, it’s not just down to hard work. I had a ridiculous run of luck. Some of that I earned but some of it I didn’t. People from very privileged backgrounds decided to help me and that’s what gave me the advantage.
“If you want to test if meritocracy works, you could take Boris Johnson out of Downing Street, stick him in a housing scheme somewhere, take his money, his titles and contacts away, then tell him to become Prime Minister again. You’d see the reality of the significance of a starting point in life.
“Welfare reform is based on the assumption that most people are lazy, they don’t want to
work and they need to be psychologically manipulated and humiliated into getting off their arses. That’s hundreds of years of classism and it is more naked in Britain now than ever before.”
When Darren met Sir Tom Hunter, the self-made Scots billionaire told him that class had never held him back.
Darren said: “I had to keep bringing the subject of class back into our discussion. On one hand he is a Scottish success story, who uses his power and privilege to try to influence politics for the benefit of people who don’t have a voice. At the same time, he actively rejects the concept of class and I think that’s indicative of people at a certain level in society.
“He doesn’t perceive, or may have forgotten, how pertinent class remains for so many people.”
But Darren also found the comfortable world of the upper classes to be seductive. He met Dee Ward, chairman of Wildlife Estates Scotland, and joined him on a grouse shoot on his 8000-acre estate.
The Angus landowner charmed him with his gentility and passion for the environment.
Darren said: “I had this image of some mad Tory in my head, but he was incredibly disarming. I began to understand how looking at the world from a remote and lofty vantage point, it can seem reassuringly simple when you are not interfacing with poverty.”
He played croquet with journalist Hugo Rifkind, son of former Cabinet minister Sir Malcolm, who admitted that even without family wealth his upper-class status would guarantee him a social accessibility Darren would never have.
Our social class can easily be judged by accent and Glaswegian has consistently been polled the least favoured in the UK.
On one media project, Darren heard chatter that TV executives felt his accent was so strong it needed subtitles.
He said: “You have TV companies keen to fly their progressive flag but there is still this rife classism that finds expression in judgment of accent.
“Language, for me, is the area where class is most evident. People are surprised that someone like me is capable of constructing coherent sentences without defecating themselves.”
Darren met Jane Stuart-Smith, professor of phonetics & sociolinguistics at
Glasgow University, who told him received pronunciation, once known as BBC English, still remains the most trusted accent, despite being spoken by only six per cent of the population.
Accent and postcode influence how we are judged by teachers, police, social workers, doctors and employers. Darren said: “I am in a position where I can
withstand these things. Not everyone can.”
Throughout the series, he indeed proves his point that the class system not only exists but is thriving.
He said: “Anyone who is still in denial that class exists after watching the four episodes could never be persuaded.
“There are those who insist that class as a concept is no longer relevant and some who even argue that it doesn’t exist. With all due respect, whether you choose to believe in gravity or not, your belief has absolutely no bearing on the tremendous force it exerts over everything.”
● Darren McGarvey’s Class Wars starts on BBC Scotland at 10pm on February 9.
